Enabling academic work through cloud computing

Amazingly, someone who never used to be a big believer of cloud computing (you would see me bringing my USB sticks everywhere, or in old, ancient times, 3.5″ floppy disks) is now a full-on convert. For the past 2-3 years I have executed projects in the social media space that have required me to make use of collaborative tools. To this day, I’m still not a fan of wikis (except I do use them in my teaching at UBC).

But the two tools I find myself using for my academic work more and more are Google Docs and Dropbox. Dropbox has saved the day a few times not only for my teaching (I save my lecture slides, graphics and other data on Dropbox), but also my academic research (I collaborate with my students by saving academic journal articles in PDF format and sharing them with my colleagues and students). I also co-write journal article manuscripts by either co-editing online at the same time on Google Documents or saving draft after draft in Dropbox.

I find that more and more, I make use of cloud computing, and while I expected I would use it in my consulting work, it’s the positive impact it’s having on my academic life that has me completely surprised.